Human-caused global warming has just nudged past 1.5°C, according to a new method we have developed. That’s approaching 0.2°C higher than previously thought.
But this does not mean the goal of keeping warming below 1.5°C is dead, as the Paris agreement and the UN climate summits are based on different methodology.
This additional warming comes out of how we define what was pre-industrial, with our method using bubbles of air buried in Antarctic ice to gather data reaching back well before the industrial era. Current methods exclude some of the early warming. We also radically improve how well we know these numbers.
